Helen Howe, monologuist and author, was born in Boston on January 11, 1905, the daughter
of Mark Anthony DeWolfe Howe, biographer and author, and Fanny Howe, essayist. She
was the sister of Quincy Howe, editor and radio commentator, and of Mark DeWolfe Howe,
professor of law at Harvard University. Howe attended Milton Academy and Radcliffe
College x'27, and studied acting with Georges Vitray in France. She taught at the
Fiske School in Boston for one year and then went to the New York Theater Guild in
1926. There her talent for monologues was encouraged and she began performing, at
first for friends and then in public. She was acclaimed in London in 1936 and ranked
with Ruth Draper and Cornelia Otis Skinner for her pungent satirical sketches. During
World War II she toured the country for "Community Concerts." Her first novel The Whole Heart was published in 1943, followed by We Happy Few (1946), The Circle of the Day (1950), The Success (1956), and The Fires of Autumn (1959). The Gentle Americans, 1864-1900: Biography of A Breed , a family history that focused on her father, Mark Anthony DeWolfe Howe, was published
in 1965. In 1946 Howe married Reginald Allen, Curator of the Gilbert and Sullivan
Collection of the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, and former administrator of
the Metropolitan Opera and the Philadelphia Orchestra.

The collection includes extensive family correspondence and other papers, among them
the writings and correspondence of Fanny Quincy Howe, the correspondence of Mark Anthony
DeWolfe Howe with Helen Howe and other family members, the correspondence of Howe
with her brothers, her sister-in-law (Mary Manning Howe), and her nieces. It includes
Howe's professional correspondence and her correspondence with friends. Series II,
Howe's Writings, includes diaries, drafts of published novels, drafts of her unpublished
autobiography, the unpublished account of her relationship with John Marquand and
a complete ts. of the unpublished novel "The Center". The monologues (list included
with inventory) have been removed and given to the Theater Collection, Harvard University.